Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188 View this blog in Magazine View.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Collaborative data matrices using EditGrid

EditGrid is an online collaborative spreadsheet tool that I stumbled across via Ogle Earth. It strikes me thjat this could be a way to create phylogenetic data sets collaboratively.

As a quick test I grabbed the Vertebrates example file that comes with MacClade, exported the NEXUS file as a table, opened it in Excel, then uploaded the Excel file to EditGrid. You can see the results here.

The spreadsheet is a natural metaphor for phylogenetic data, although in this application is is likely to be better suited to morphological data where a team of people are assembling a matrix from various sources.

The developers of EditGrid have a blog whioch converys their own sense of excitement about this project.